Perhaps I’ve missed it, but I haven’t seen in this interesting thread any mention of the reasons I think account for the death throes of the audio industry in America.
1. I live in a city with an MSA of a million people. In a typical issue of Stereophile magazine, not a single piece of equipment reviewed can be auditioned in my city. If one piece does happen to be on display in our one remaining stereo store, none of the others will be, making comparisons impossible.
2. The published specs for audio equipment are meaningless. Virtually all amplifiers, integrated amplifiers, and receivers can reproduce the entire frequency spectrum. So can virtually all CD players. Speakers are more variable, but they all can go higher than I (or most people) can hear. The low end does matter, but there are scores of speakers out there which go lower than any orchestral instrument (except piano and harp and pipe organ). But the fact that a piece of audio equipment can reproduce a note, tells you nothing about how it sounds. They can all reproduce a middle C; so can a car horn. Therefore, auditioning is essential; indeed, people like to advise you to trust your ears; but as noted in #1, there’s nowhere nearby to hear anything.
3. Well, there are online sellers who offer free trials. So, for example, I tried a pair of Ohm MicroWalshes, didn’t like them, the company kept its promise and refunded every cent I paid for the speakers – but shipping cost me $50 inward (a bargain) and $180 outward, for a total of $230 for my free trial. Larger and more expensive speakers would cost still more to ship. Let’s say you fancy a pair of Harbeths, which have a fanatic following. The three middle models are around the same size and run from around $4,000 to $7,000. There is nowhere within 500 miles of my home to audition these speakers. Home trial? I would need to find a seller willing to ship me three sets of speakers knowing he would get at least two sets back; I would need to lay out, say, $15,000, and spend many hundreds of dollars to ship them all back if I didn’t like any of them; and as the company does not sell direct in the U.S., I would be at the mercy of the seller’s solvency – if he went out of business, I would not be able to return them, indeed I would have no recourse if some of them arrived damaged as UPS and FedEx will only deal with the shipper to make claims.
4. Finally, there’s the “progress” of modern architecture. When I retired to Arizona, I brought with me the speakers I had lived with for 35 years and loved – a pair of Klipschorns. I discovered to my horror that modern houses have no corners, often no walls between the living room, dining room and kitchen. I did find a house with a few walls – I refuse to have a noisy refrigerator in my living room – but my living room has but one corner, the other should-be corners occupied by the front door, a back patio door, and an archway. In fact, as the walls are made of dry wall (cardboard, really), the single corner isn’t really a corner at all from the vantage of a K-Horn – sound doesn’t reflect off cardboard.
5. Finally finally, the audio magazines and catalogues are filled with superlatives which, applied to everything on offer, have no meaning at all. This amp is ideal, that one is perfect, that one punches well above its weight, that one sounds better than it has any right to at its price (which may be more than your car is worth, but when you hear it – which you have no way of doing without actually buying it – you’ll realize it’s really a bargain).
Music has played, and continues to play, a large part in my life. I can afford to indulge my hobby, and I have – since I culled my record collection for lack of room, I have acquired thousands of CDs. If I can’t upgrade my audio equipment due to lack of opportunity, I am scarcely surprised that young people – I’m much older than anybody in this thread – won’t even try.